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Dan Gibas

Dan Gibas, Director, HYGEN HYGEN Web Design
A British expat web monkey living in Malaysia. Hire me!

Open / Convert Adobe .AI Files In Linux

January 3rd, 2008 | by admin |

I was unable to open or convert Adobe Illustrator files (*.ai) under Linux, using The Gimp and some other software too. Unable to find any answers online I came accross this service from Adobe…

http://createpdf.adobe.com/

With A trial membership (free) you can convert up to 5 files online. However this service is useless if time is of any importance to you…

Document ID:
477CB026-211C-28A822

Results Will Be Sent To: dangibas@gmail.com
Delivery Method: E-mail Attachment
Conversion Will Start In: 12 hours and 5 minutes

WTF! 12 hours and 5 minutes? Commercial, proprietry software sucks! Thanks Adobe, but no thanks - I just won’t accept any Adobe files anymore and will ask for open formats or anything else that works.

After the 12 hours I finally got emailed the converted document and it did not even work! The PDF file just contained some text -

This is an Adobe@I llustrator@fi le that was
saved without PDF content.
To place or open this file in other
applications, it should be re-saved from
Adobe Illustrator with the “Create PDF
Compatible File” option turned on. This
option is in the Illustrator Native Format
Options dialog box, which appears when
saving an Adobe Illustrator file using the
Save As command.

2 Responses to “Open / Convert Adobe .AI Files In Linux”

[2]

On February 4th, 2010 at 10:24 pm admin wrote:

Hi Sirgt,

Thanks for sharing! Here is the link to download Inkscape for anyone else who wants to open Adobe .ai files on Linux - http://www.inkscape.org/download/?lang=en

This blog post is a bit aged - The Gimp can open .ai files but it seems still has issues with the “layers”.

Ask whoever sends you .ai files to send in .svg (w3c compliant open format) - .svg is far better. Even saving as .psd (PhotoShop) format then opening with The Gimp on Linux works well.

Dan

[1]

On February 4th, 2010 at 9:54 pm sirgt wrote:

Hi,
I came to your blog looking for a solution for this problem, and I found out after an hour trying, install Inkscape and import the file.
Works great!